SuperDuper
SuperDuper 2.5 Released
2008-02-05
SuperDuper, the application I use for my back ups has finally been released for Leopard. That was the last item I needed before updating my iMac, but I may wait until 10.5.2 is released before going Leopard, since reports are that it is close to completion. I'm sure that Aperture will appear soon after, so I'll have plenty to play with.
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Still Waiting For One Application Before Plunging Into Leopard
2007-11-25
While on the topic of backing up, it is worth noting that SuperDuper for Leopard is still not quite ready. Since RapidWeaver (used to create this blog) was updated with some bug fixes, SuperDuper is the last remaining application I need to have ready before taking the leap.
A Week Without Leopard
2007-11-04
Roadster: 1/25s f/6.3 ISO400 55mm, Canon 30D, EF-S 17-55mm f/2.8
It's been a week since I went to the Los Gatos Apple store and picked up my copy of Leopard. But I'm not running it yet. I'm waiting for three things: an update to SuperDuper, some fixes for RapidWeaver, and an update to Aperture. All have some issues, or at least the potential of issues, when running under Leopard and since these are critical applications for me, I have to wait until they are ready.
The Apple discussions have reports of some odd problems with Aperture running on Leopard. Some people cannot launch the application beyond the splash screen. Others get crashes at the same point. Some can see their images, but get a crash as soon as they try to do anything with them. I've seen some problems fixed by turning off Time Machine, but others not. It's hard to distinguish one cause from another because the hardware configurations are so different. My suspicion is that graphics drivers are at least partly involved, but people have been able to fix some problems by ignoring ownership on firewire volumes. Suggestions are that Prokit and corrupted images are to blame as well.
The menu bar can vanish too. Some people have found that font duplicates were the cause. Others find that Leopard is thinking their video card is unsupported and once they get past that the menus come back. Spaces causes some odd interactions with Full screen in Aperture, but this is not specifically an Aperture issue. It interacts strangely with a number of applications. One person had problems with a color picker preventing Aperture preferences appearing. There are clearly many ways that all manner of easily forgotten additions cause problems under Leopard.
Meanwhile I've been booting into a copy of Leopard installed on another partition and playing with it there. I've already made a snapshot of my Tiger drive that I will keep for at least six months: that's my insurance in case of corruption or my own stupidity. When I do move over, I'll do all the requisite back ups and checks, clean out my fonts, remove all the non-standard preference panes and start-up items, unplug all the peripherals, etc. and then do an update install. The next step will be to test everything that's critical to make sure I don't need to revert and go forward with my fingers crossed.
Getting The 24 Inch iMac Into Shape
2006-11-20
What else have I been doing with this new monster on my desk over the past few days? It has not been all plain sailing, but the issues I have encountered have been minor, easily diagnosed, and fixed quickly.
First I backed it up to a 750G Firewire drive using SuperDuper. I use two of these drives in rotation (keeping one off-site at all times) and make a copy of the hard drive onto sparse disk image. I could not use an incremental back up as I usually do because everything had been updated in the move from the old G5 iMac, so this took a long time: about four hours for 160G of data (600,000 files, encrypted disk image). A second back up to a different drive without using a disk image or encryption took 2 hours 15 minutes.
Next I went through all my applications and utilities checking to see what was PowerPC and what was Intel or Universal. I did this quickly by bringing up the file inspector with option command I. It looks just like the file information window (command I), but updates as I click on different files. So this cuts out all the opening and closing of windows I would have had to do. Each time I found a PowerPC only application that I still wanted I made an alias of it on my desktop with option command drag, and when complete, I put all of those into a folder. This gives me a list of applications to go seek out Intel versions later. Pretty much everything I care about is now Intel. A few lingering Classic applications will no longer run (Intel Macs have no Classic support), so those were deleted. I found out later that another way to find all of my PowerPC applications is to use System Profiler. The Applications section finds them all and they can be sorted by CPU.
On opening GarageBand I found that all my audio units were missing. These are plug-ins that provide audio processing and synthesizers. Again this was a CPU difference problem, so I had to go find updates for those. My USB audio box (MobilePre) was showing up, but not working. I had to uninstall and reinstall the driver to fix that. It seems I already had an Intel driver, but the installer only installs the one needed at the time. While applications can be universal, some of the more fundamental parts of the OS cannot and need separate code for each CPU.
Migration Assistant had copied across all my network settings including the static IP address and warned me that I was going to have a problem if I didn't change one. I fixed that by changing the old Mac to DHCP.
RapidWeaver, the application I use to write this blog, developed a problem whereby it would hang loading my site file. I trashed the prefs and that was fixed. There were some interface changes following that, so I think that this was not an Intel problem at all, but a preferences corruption that had occurred a long time ago that just happened to not be fatal on PowerPC.
Not much maxes out the CPUs. They are usually very evenly loaded (I use Menu Meters to view their activity), so this implies that most applications are efficiently multithreaded. Even when I do max them out, the machine is still perfectly responsive, handles network traffic, launches applications, etc. Exporting from Aperture, converting video files, that kind of thing are the only activities that are limited by the CPU. I can hear the fans if I stress the machine, but I have to think about it. The hard drive is the noisiest part when it is doing a lot of seeking. Audio applications like GarageBand and iTunes hardly make a dent in the CPU.
Window resizing is silky smooth. I'm doing it right now while converting a 250MB AVI file from my digital camera to H.264. Playing two 1080p HD movies at the same time certainly makes the machine busy, but doesn't slow it down. So where are the limitations? Probably mainly in the hard drive -- seek time and transfer speed. Sometimes in the memory access. I can't do anything about the RAM except for an upgrade to 3G when the 2G sticks come down in price. But I could speed the disk access with an external RAID system on the FW800 bus.
Apple Remote Desktop 2.2 did not work as an administrator on this Intel Mac. But there is a fix. It involves deleting some files that cause the incompatibility. A side effect is that it becomes impossible to manage this Mac remotely. But that is not a problem for me.
First I backed it up to a 750G Firewire drive using SuperDuper. I use two of these drives in rotation (keeping one off-site at all times) and make a copy of the hard drive onto sparse disk image. I could not use an incremental back up as I usually do because everything had been updated in the move from the old G5 iMac, so this took a long time: about four hours for 160G of data (600,000 files, encrypted disk image). A second back up to a different drive without using a disk image or encryption took 2 hours 15 minutes.
Next I went through all my applications and utilities checking to see what was PowerPC and what was Intel or Universal. I did this quickly by bringing up the file inspector with option command I. It looks just like the file information window (command I), but updates as I click on different files. So this cuts out all the opening and closing of windows I would have had to do. Each time I found a PowerPC only application that I still wanted I made an alias of it on my desktop with option command drag, and when complete, I put all of those into a folder. This gives me a list of applications to go seek out Intel versions later. Pretty much everything I care about is now Intel. A few lingering Classic applications will no longer run (Intel Macs have no Classic support), so those were deleted. I found out later that another way to find all of my PowerPC applications is to use System Profiler. The Applications section finds them all and they can be sorted by CPU.
On opening GarageBand I found that all my audio units were missing. These are plug-ins that provide audio processing and synthesizers. Again this was a CPU difference problem, so I had to go find updates for those. My USB audio box (MobilePre) was showing up, but not working. I had to uninstall and reinstall the driver to fix that. It seems I already had an Intel driver, but the installer only installs the one needed at the time. While applications can be universal, some of the more fundamental parts of the OS cannot and need separate code for each CPU.
Migration Assistant had copied across all my network settings including the static IP address and warned me that I was going to have a problem if I didn't change one. I fixed that by changing the old Mac to DHCP.
RapidWeaver, the application I use to write this blog, developed a problem whereby it would hang loading my site file. I trashed the prefs and that was fixed. There were some interface changes following that, so I think that this was not an Intel problem at all, but a preferences corruption that had occurred a long time ago that just happened to not be fatal on PowerPC.
Not much maxes out the CPUs. They are usually very evenly loaded (I use Menu Meters to view their activity), so this implies that most applications are efficiently multithreaded. Even when I do max them out, the machine is still perfectly responsive, handles network traffic, launches applications, etc. Exporting from Aperture, converting video files, that kind of thing are the only activities that are limited by the CPU. I can hear the fans if I stress the machine, but I have to think about it. The hard drive is the noisiest part when it is doing a lot of seeking. Audio applications like GarageBand and iTunes hardly make a dent in the CPU.
Window resizing is silky smooth. I'm doing it right now while converting a 250MB AVI file from my digital camera to H.264. Playing two 1080p HD movies at the same time certainly makes the machine busy, but doesn't slow it down. So where are the limitations? Probably mainly in the hard drive -- seek time and transfer speed. Sometimes in the memory access. I can't do anything about the RAM except for an upgrade to 3G when the 2G sticks come down in price. But I could speed the disk access with an external RAID system on the FW800 bus.
Apple Remote Desktop 2.2 did not work as an administrator on this Intel Mac. But there is a fix. It involves deleting some files that cause the incompatibility. A side effect is that it becomes impossible to manage this Mac remotely. But that is not a problem for me.
A SuperDuper Back Up Strategy For The Mac
2006-06-11
Having given up on network back ups some time ago, I have been experimenting with and formulating back up strategies for the various machines around here. The goal is to back up quickly and be able to recover quickly without spending too much money and without being forced into software upgrades due to OS changes (ahem, Retrospect, I'm talking to you here).
Here is what I have come up with. Note that it is for back up only, not archiving. In other words, the immediate goal is to recover from failure, not store data long-term.
Each machine has its hard drive partitioned into a boot volume and a Scratch volume. The Scratch volume is never backed up and is typically 20% of the drive. It's a place for big files, anything that is generated by software from backed up files, temporary items, DV captures, etc. This strategy prevents unnecessary backing up of large temporary data.
Each machine gets a Firewire drive that is at least 25% bigger than the amount of data on the boot volume. The Firewire drive has a single partition. The drive is left turned on all the time, but the volume is unmounted. The machine is set to wake up at 5:30am and SuperDuper is set to run a scheduled copy at 5:31am using a smart copy. What SuperDuper does is to mount the drive, compare the firewire contents with the boot drive content, copy and delete as appropriate, then unmount the drive. Typically this takes fifteen to thirty minutes once the initial copy of the whole drive is performed.
What this buys me is near-instant recovery from a hard drive failure. Recovery works like this: HD fails. Boot machine with Option held down and select the Firewire drive. Machine boots from Firewire drive. I know exactly up to when good data is available, and therefore what I have to do to fill in the missing pieces. I lose a maximum of one day's work. And I can lose less if I schedule more copies during the day, such as at lunch time. It is not that expensive because the Firewire drives can be small and old.
What this does not do is handle catastrophic failures such as as fires, so there is an extra step. For off-site back ups I could maintain an extra set of Firewire drives and switch them with the on-site ones periodically. I actually don't do this because a) it means a lot of drives lugged about, and b) I don't have that many old drives. So instead I have two large capacity new drives (750G each) and have at most one of them on-site at any time.
On those drives I store sparse disk images, one per boot volume I need to back up. Sparse disk images grow as data is added to them, but do not shrink as it is deleted (but a Terminal command line can be used to shrink them back). Periodically I back up the machines, again using SuperDuper's smart copy, this time copying the hard drive to the mounted sparse disk image. In addition, to being convenient and not wasting space, sparse disk images give me the ability to encrypt the data. So all of my disk images are encrypted, ensuring that a lost or stolen back-up drive is no greater a loss than the value of the hardware. The large capacity drives get swapped around each time all the machines have been backed up.
Another convenience of this strategy is that the downtime on the machines is very small. The back up to the sparse disk images on the large capacity drive need not use any time at all on the machine it is backing up, since the Firewire drive that is sitting next to it can be disconnected (it is not even mounted most of the time), carried to another machine, the back up done there, and the drive returned.
Recovery from sparse disk images is easy too, but more time-consuming. Assuming that the machine and its local Firewire drive have been destroyed, the first step is to get a new machine or commandeer an existing one. Then that machine is booted not from its local hard drive, but from a boot partition on the large capacity firewire drive. I keep a small (10G) boot partition on each drive and make sure that the OS revision is low enough to boot any machine I want to recover. Now I can use Disk Utility to replace the machine's main hard drive contents with the contents of the sparse disk image I select (as long as I remember the password of course). Several hours later I can reboot from the internal hard drive of the new machine and I am back in business.
I have had two hard drives fail on me (before I adopted this strategy) and lost very little because of my back up paranoia. So I know there are other ways to achieve effective back up. However it took days to recover each time, and was a painful and disruptive process.
Here is what I have come up with. Note that it is for back up only, not archiving. In other words, the immediate goal is to recover from failure, not store data long-term.
Each machine has its hard drive partitioned into a boot volume and a Scratch volume. The Scratch volume is never backed up and is typically 20% of the drive. It's a place for big files, anything that is generated by software from backed up files, temporary items, DV captures, etc. This strategy prevents unnecessary backing up of large temporary data.
Each machine gets a Firewire drive that is at least 25% bigger than the amount of data on the boot volume. The Firewire drive has a single partition. The drive is left turned on all the time, but the volume is unmounted. The machine is set to wake up at 5:30am and SuperDuper is set to run a scheduled copy at 5:31am using a smart copy. What SuperDuper does is to mount the drive, compare the firewire contents with the boot drive content, copy and delete as appropriate, then unmount the drive. Typically this takes fifteen to thirty minutes once the initial copy of the whole drive is performed.
What this buys me is near-instant recovery from a hard drive failure. Recovery works like this: HD fails. Boot machine with Option held down and select the Firewire drive. Machine boots from Firewire drive. I know exactly up to when good data is available, and therefore what I have to do to fill in the missing pieces. I lose a maximum of one day's work. And I can lose less if I schedule more copies during the day, such as at lunch time. It is not that expensive because the Firewire drives can be small and old.
What this does not do is handle catastrophic failures such as as fires, so there is an extra step. For off-site back ups I could maintain an extra set of Firewire drives and switch them with the on-site ones periodically. I actually don't do this because a) it means a lot of drives lugged about, and b) I don't have that many old drives. So instead I have two large capacity new drives (750G each) and have at most one of them on-site at any time.
On those drives I store sparse disk images, one per boot volume I need to back up. Sparse disk images grow as data is added to them, but do not shrink as it is deleted (but a Terminal command line can be used to shrink them back). Periodically I back up the machines, again using SuperDuper's smart copy, this time copying the hard drive to the mounted sparse disk image. In addition, to being convenient and not wasting space, sparse disk images give me the ability to encrypt the data. So all of my disk images are encrypted, ensuring that a lost or stolen back-up drive is no greater a loss than the value of the hardware. The large capacity drives get swapped around each time all the machines have been backed up.
Another convenience of this strategy is that the downtime on the machines is very small. The back up to the sparse disk images on the large capacity drive need not use any time at all on the machine it is backing up, since the Firewire drive that is sitting next to it can be disconnected (it is not even mounted most of the time), carried to another machine, the back up done there, and the drive returned.
Recovery from sparse disk images is easy too, but more time-consuming. Assuming that the machine and its local Firewire drive have been destroyed, the first step is to get a new machine or commandeer an existing one. Then that machine is booted not from its local hard drive, but from a boot partition on the large capacity firewire drive. I keep a small (10G) boot partition on each drive and make sure that the OS revision is low enough to boot any machine I want to recover. Now I can use Disk Utility to replace the machine's main hard drive contents with the contents of the sparse disk image I select (as long as I remember the password of course). Several hours later I can reboot from the internal hard drive of the new machine and I am back in business.
I have had two hard drives fail on me (before I adopted this strategy) and lost very little because of my back up paranoia. So I know there are other ways to achieve effective back up. However it took days to recover each time, and was a painful and disruptive process.
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